If you chuckled when you read the phrase Pen15 in the title of this review, or if you are between the ages of 30 and 38, I suspect Pen15 will hit your perfect nostalgic sweet spot. And if that first sentence doesn’t apply to you, well, there’s still plenty to love about the new Hulu […]
There’s something magical about settling in to watch an episode of One Day at a Time. Perhaps it’s the nostalgia factor of watching a multi-cam sitcom taped in front of a live studio audience. Maybe it’s the familiar pacing of a family sitcom. It could be the sharp writing that is infused with heart. Or […]
Five years ago, when Netflix announced it has acquired Tiny Fey and Robert Carlock’s new comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt from the NBC scrapheap (the series was developed for NBC, who passed on it after an entire season had been completed), I was suitably intrigued to see what Fey and Carlock had put together. Now, having […]
Give ’em the old razzle dazzle Razzle Dazzle ’em Give ’em an act with lots of flash in it And the reaction will be passionate Give ’em the old hocus pocus Bead and feather ’em How can they see with sequins in their eyes? What if your hinges all are rusting? What if, in fact, […]
“You brought me home. My family exists today because you saved my life,” a man said while hugging a fellow veteran. That line would sound dramatic enough on a show like NBC’s This is Us, but when it is steeped in reality it’s all the more powerful. Many of us credit a person who helped […]
What happens if Doctor Who becomes too much about humanity and not enough about space? Like with all great works of literature or art or entertainment, there is much more deep, philosophical material behind the facade of strange aliens. Why the show has become so popular is a dedication not to a character, to a […]
The first thing I said upon finishing Amazon’s excellent new thriller Homecoming was, “Wow, I forgot how good Julia Roberts is.” And I suspect that’s going to be the major headline for most of the reviews of the series: Julia Roberts is a star, and this show reminds us just how engaging she can be […]
When the unsurprisingly vague trailer for Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men follow-up The Romanoffs dropped this past summer, it made viewers wonder just what, exactly, the anthology series would be about. After watching the first three episodes released for critics (of eight total), I’m still wondering. While critics were presented with the typical Weiner list of […]
In an already-politicized world of “fake news,” where does one of the original biting comedies about Washington fit in? That’s the question viewers face as CBS relaunches Murphy Brown (9:30 Eastern/8:30 Central) on Thursday in a Donald Trump world. For 288 episodes in the late 1980s to late 1990s, the show parodied, but also advocated, […]
All things work together for good. That seems to be the mantra, repeated multiple times, by characters in the pilot of NBC’s new drama Manifest, and that slightly edited biblical line seems to resonate for only so long before viewers are forced to wonder: whose definition of good? And, perhaps more importantly, will the show […]
